In an interview with iPolitics, Ambrose said she opposes gendercide but cabinet will vote against Mark Warawa’s motion.

“The concern about Mr. Warawa’s motion is that the opposition has positioned it as an issue about abortion so it becomes a very divisive issue. I haven’t decided but I will probably vote with the cabinet which is going to be voting against it, only because it has been set up that way.”

Ambrose’s comments come only a few months after she voted in favour of another motion that many critics charged was an attempt to re-open the thorny question of abortion in Canada. Ambrose supported a motion put forward by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth, which called for a committee to look at the legal definition of a human being. Currently the law only legally recognizes someone as a human being at the moment of live birth.

Ambrose was one of many members of the Conservative caucus to vote in favour of Woodworth’s motion. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper voted against it, he has long maintained that MPs should be free to vote according to their conscience on moral questions.

At the time, Ambrose explained that her opposition to sex-selective abortion guided her vote.

“I have repeatedly raised concerns about discrimination of girls by sex-selection abortion,” she responded on twitter to a question about her vote. “No law needed, but we need awareness.”

Speaking in an interview with iPolitics to mark International Women’s Day, Ambrose said she remains concerned that some Canadian women are terminating pregnancies on the basis of the sex of the fetus.

“Yes, it is a reality, we have seen it through the CBC documentary on the ultrasound clinics, but I think what we need to do is to get through to the women and the men in certain cultures that still believe that having a girl is not a positive thing. We just have to keep that up. I think that is a generational thing too, so we hope that we can get that message through to those communities.”

Sex selection through abortion is also a hot topic around the world, Ambrose said.

“This is a huge issue at the United Nations, it’s a huge issue globally, this issue of gendercide. The way that I have spoken out about it in the communities, the immigrant communities, is about raising awareness. At the end of the day this is about empowering women to believe that girls and boys are equal and in Canada they are.”

The question of sex-selective abortion is just one of a number of emerging issues Ambrose has been grappling with as Canada’s status of women minister. Earlier this week, she was at the United Nations in New York, speaking on questions that included honour killings and forced marriages.

Ambrose said honour-based violence against women is an emerging issue that she first spoke out about two years ago.

“The first time I really spoke out about it was at the UN and interestingly I was criticized by some women’s groups who said this isn’t a big issue so you shouldn’t focus on it but my view was that these are women who need my voice.”

Ambrose also gave them money, funding a number of grassroots initiatives.

“We have a shelter now that deals with immigrant women and has all of their products translated into different languages. We have a number of projects in the Toronto area. There is one project in the York region that is going to touch something like 13,000 young women dealing with the issue of honour-motivated violence and bullying.”

Ambrose said the government has hosted a conference with Indo-Canadian women and is organizing a second one to help educate front-line service providers “to recognize the difference between intimate partner violence and honour violence — there’s a difference when it comes to domestic violence.”

In honour-motivated violence, there is the potential for the entire family or extended family to become complicit, Ambrose explained.

“With a family member, it is hard to divorce your family. In with a lot of these communities they are very, very close-knit communities and it’s really, really difficult for the women — whether they are wives or daughters — to deal with the societal pressure from extended family or within their own family members.”

The psychological aftermath is also complex, she added.

“It’s a whole new dynamic for social workers and police officers and immigration officials so we’re working on raising awareness, we’re working on training, we’re working on safe places for these girls and women to go.”

While Ambrose is watching cases of honour violence closely, she said there is no plan to amend the criminal code to set a higher penalty in the case of an honour crime.

Another problem the government is tackling is forced marriages, said Ambrose.

“We have put forward legislation to deal with fraudulent marriages which can be forced marriages and it can be early force marriages too.”

At the same time, the legislation protects women forced into a fraudulent marriage from being deported, she said.

“It is an issue that is not only happening internationally. Like honour crimes, (once) you start to engage with women in the immigrant community, you start to find out that these kinds of issues are happening right here in our own communities.”